When most people think of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, they of course think of the Oscars themselves, The Academy Awards. However, there's a surprising amount of interesting and entertaining things going on all year with Academy Originals. If The Academy Awards are like the Oscars' birthday, then Academy Originals are akin to holidays, delightful moments scattered throughout the year.
The Academy Originals include unique video interviews with a plethora of filmmakers and actors, explorations of film history, behind-the-scenes videos, and more. The most recent addition to this pedigree is a podcast, The Art of Documentary, hosted by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jim LeBrecht, who was the co-director and co-producer — alongside Nicole Newnham — of the great documentary Crip Camp.
The Art of Documentary is a six-episode series featuring in-depth interviews with some of the most interesting and acclaimed documentary directors working today. The first episode has just launched, and subsequent episodes will debut each following week every Wednesday, and are available across all podcast platforms.
The Art of Documentary Interviews Some of Today's Most Interesting Directors
Universal Pictures
The newly released first episode features an interview with Danny Cohen, who directed the delightful Anonymous Club, a cool and intimate look at the utterly charming Australian musician Courtney Barnett. Cohen is entrenched in music video filmmaking, having worked with her on previous videos, and also with Kirin J. Callinan and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard.
Upcoming episodes feature interviews with Bing Liu (All These Sons and Minding The Gap), Chase Joynt and Aisling (No Ordinary Man), Kirsten Johnson (Dick Johnson Is Dead and Cameraperson), Garrett Bradley (TIME and Naomi Osaka), and Roger Ross Williams (Music by Prudence and Life, Animated), who also co-directed the upcoming HBO's Donna Summer documentary, Love to Love You, Donna Summer.
It's a diverse variety of people of films being represented in The Art of Documentary, from the more playfully experimental work of Kirsten Johnson and the genre-defying work of Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt, to the serious and piercing explorations of Garrett Bradley. They represent a new swath of documentary filmmakers who are breaking the rules and changing the medium itself as documentaries become more and more mainstream every year.
The docuseries has become one of the most popular television formats in recent years, thanks to the extremely bingeworthy shows produced by Netflix, HBO, and other platforms. Never before have documentary series rivaled big narrative fiction shows in popularity, and documentary films are doing the same. Films like The Tinder Swindler, Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off, Moonage Daydream, Navalny, and Wildcat were some of the most talked-about of 2022. They may not all look like the Maysles Brothers, Barbara Kopple, or D.A. Pennebaker, but these films are moving the art forward in wonderfully different ways.
If you're a fan of documentary films or even just cinema itself, The Art of Documentary will be a must-listen. The first episode is available now, with new episodes airing each subsequent Wednesday. It can be listened to on Amazon Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.